All Our Pretty Songs Part 3

Inside, we order soup. The waiter is even younger than we are. He brings us cream puffs in paper wrappers. Aurora tears hers in half, licks out the cream at the center. "You got some on your nose," Jack says, and leans forward to wipe it away with his thumb. Aurora beams at him. I tear apart basil and cilantro and heap them on my noodles, stir in plum sauce, don't look up until he leans back in his seat again. Aurora dumps in half the bottle of chili sauce, gets to work with her chopsticks. She always eats like it's her last meal. I try to be dainty for Jack's benefit, but I am not graceful under the best of circ.u.mstances, and I give up quick. Aurora sings under her breath, a line about driving down the coast at night. It's from one of her dad's songs.

Without warning I'm seized by happiness so huge I want to jump up and hug them both. This is my life, I think, these are my friends. Jack is a mystery, but he's my mystery, smiling at me now like we both know a secret that's too good to keep to ourselves. There's Aurora, shoveling noodles into her mouth, licking chili sauce off her fingers: the most beautiful girl in the world, but also the funniest and the most generous and the easiest to love. The air is that kind of warm where you feel like you're floating, and I'm full and my Vietnamese iced coffee is thick and sweet but not too sweet, and Jack is holding my hand under the table. Everyone in the restaurant keeps turning to look at us. Summer is happening, and our whole lives are in front of us, and here we are, making a circle out of love.

Later, Aurora drives us back to her house. I call Ca.s.s and tell her I'm sleeping over. "Okay," she says, yawning into the phone. "See you in the morning. Tell Aurora I'll do her chart this week if she wants." Aurora is privately dubious when it comes to Ca.s.s's magical powers, but she takes Ca.s.s's astrological advice like it's straight gospel. I'm more skeptical. Getting life advice from your mom is always a bad call anyway, even if technically it's coming from s.p.a.ce rocks.

Aurora wants to watch The Abyss. We pile into her bed like puppies. I stretch out between the two of them and they curl into me, Jack's arm around my shoulders, Aurora's head on my chest. I run my fingers through her hair and she dozes until the alien tongue of water makes its way through the cabin to say h.e.l.lo. That's her favorite part. When Coffey shuts the hatch on it and it collapses in a giant wave, she turns her face up to Jack. "I like you," she says sleepily. "You can stay. But if you f.u.c.k with my sister, I'll slit your throat in your sleep."

"Stay frosty," he says, and she opens her eyes wide.

"Wow," she says to me. "This one, you must keep." I hug them closer. We fall asleep like that in her big soft bed, tangled up in each other, and when the white light of morning wakes me I can't tell where my body ends and their bodies begin.

When Jack leaves in the afternoon Aurora makes us cup o'noodles and milkshakes-about all she can manage in the kitchen-and we go back to bed. She flips through channels until she finds an X-Files marathon. "Wicked," she says.

"Oh my G.o.d," I say, "this one is so scary." It's the episode where Mulder and Scully are in the woods. They hike in to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a timber crew and end up trapped in a cabin with a dying generator and an ecoterrorist. At night, clouds of minuscule bugs come down out of the sky and mummify anyone who strays outside the circle of the cabin's light. I've never seen alien bugs when I'm hiking, but it's not an entirely inaccurate portrayal of the peninsula. I love it out there, but those woods aren't what I would call friendly.

"This one rules so hard," Aurora says, slurping noodles.

"My baby girls." Maia's standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame.

"Hi, Maia," Aurora says, without looking away from the TV.

"Who spent the night?"

"Oh," I say, "sorry, we should have asked." It makes me feel better to pretend sometimes that Maia is a normal parent, a functional human with concerns like those of other humans with offspring. Is my daughter home safe, is my daughter fed, is my daughter opening the door of our house to strange men. Et cetera.

"You know I don't care," Maia says, coming over to sit on the edge of Aurora's bed. "I like to meet your friends."

"Ssssssh," Aurora says. It's a tense scene. Mulder and Scully and the ecoterrorist stare at the sole remaining light bulb flickering dimly in the cabin. The edges of the dark teem with bugs. The generator coughs.

"When was the last time you ate real food?" Maia asks.

"The last time you bought some," Aurora snaps.

Maia presses a hand to her chest, pretending to have been shot, and rolls her eyes. She's looking pretty good today. Black hair washed and glossy, eyes bright. More or less dressed: ragged flannel s.h.i.+rt that's way too big for her and must have been Aurora's dad's, leggings, Converse. You can mistake her for a teenager until you look in her eyes.

The episode cuts to a commercial. Aurora sucks noodles into her mouth, chugs the last of the salty broth. Ca.s.s once made me read the list of ingredients on a cup o'noodles aloud. "I want you to picture that inside your body," she'd said. I chew contentedly on a salty cube of rehydrated carrot. Mmmmmm.

"So who was that?"

"This boy I'm kind of seeing," I say. "I think." Blus.h.i.+ng. Like a teenager. Which I am. But still.

"Her boyfriend," Aurora amends.

"He is not my boyfriend."

"He is definitely your boyfriend."

"I don't have a G.o.dd.a.m.n boyfriend!"

"Is he dreamy?" Maia asks.

"He's a musician."

Maia laughs. "Does Ca.s.s know?"

"Yeah. She's kind of not stoked."

"I'm sure. Where'd you meet him? A show?"

"Here, actually. At Aurora's party. He played in the yard."

"You had a party?" Aurora's watching a commercial for tampons as if it's the most fascinating thing she's ever seen. "Why didn't you tell me you had a party?"

"You were at the party, Maia," I say cautiously. "We talked. Remember?"

"Was I?" She doesn't seem surprised. "Aurora, which party was it?"

Aurora doesn't answer. She chews on the edge of her Styrofoam cup, pats around next to her for her cigarettes without moving her eyes from the screen. "You know you're not supposed to smoke in here," Maia adds. Aurora rolls her eyes, an unconscious echo of Maia, but doesn't answer. I never tell Aurora, because she goes from placid to enraged in the s.p.a.ce of a single sentence, but they're so alike it's comical sometimes.

"It was just a few people," I say, although this isn't at all true. "You probably weren't downstairs for very long." I fight the urge to reach over and push up one sleeve of Maia's flannel s.h.i.+rt, check for red lines tracking down her brown skin. It's not like there's anything I can do. Aurora finds her cigarettes, sticks one in her mouth, lights it without looking away from the television.

"Baby," Maia says, and takes it out of her mouth. "Come on."

"Jesus," Aurora mutters, throwing herself back into the pillows with an exaggerated sigh. Maia stretches like a cat. You can still see it in her, the magic Aurora's inherited, that tangible haze of s.e.x and glamour. Even the drugs and sadness haven't ravaged it out of her. She clambers over me and burrows between us. Aurora makes an annoyed noise but relents, puts an arm around Maia's shoulders. The commercials end and we're back to the forest. Mulder and Scully are going to make a run for it. Rain pours down. The road out of the woods is a mess of mud and water. The bugs gather. I know how it ends, but I still hold my breath.

"Do they make it?" Maia asks.

"Oh my G.o.d," Aurora says. "Seriously. Shut up."

Jack invites us to come see him play at the OK Hotel. The club is already packed when we get there. Crow-haired goth girls in rosaries and lace dresses lean against the bar, surrounded by boys in leather and spikes and big boots, tattoos snaking up their arms. Aurora is wearing white, as always, a silk slip from the forties edged in fraying lace, rhinestone clips holding her hair away from her face, dusty old brown cowboy boots. In the gloomy club, she s.h.i.+nes like a firefly among all these dark moths. She tried to get me into one of her dresses, but I didn't like the feel of the night, wanted to know I could run away if I had to, or fight. So I'm wearing the same clothes as always, dark jeans and my favorite disintegrating Siouxsie s.h.i.+rt, boots for kicking. I did let Aurora outline my eyes, mess up my hair. I check myself out in the filthy bathroom mirror. I look mean, which doesn't surprise me, and s.e.xy, which does. Aurora leaves me to go get a drink and I watch her dance through the crowd, touching someone's arm, kissing someone else's cheek.

The air is hot and thick with cigarette smoke and the resinous tang of pot. Red lights are trained on the empty stage and they refract through the haze across a tangle of faces and bodies. I s.h.i.+ft from one foot to the other, my skin itchy. Someone elbows me in the back, someone else steps on my foot, and panic surges in my chest-they're going to crush me, I think. I can't breathe, and the bodies around me are pressing closer and closer, and I fight the urge to punch into the crowd. "What's the matter?" Aurora asks, coming up behind me and putting one cool hand on my cheek. "You look awful, what happened?" She hands me a drink, something clear and cold, and I gulp it down without asking what it is. Then I see who she's with. It's the skeleton man from her party. He's wearing the same clothes, or some version of the same clothes. His eyes are so dark I can't see where the pupil ends and the iris begins.

"This is Minos," Aurora says. "You remember him? He was at my party? He owns a club in LA, and he works for a record producer." She babbles on. Her voice has the plastic lilt it takes on when she's being charming. The skeleton man watches me with his flat black eyes, as though he can see right through me to that afternoon on the beach with Jack, as though he knows everything I have done and every thought I have ever had. Under that ruthless stare all my feelings seem adolescent and cheap. The stage lights dim and come up again, saving me from having to say anything. Jack comes onstage and the crowd hushes instantly. I can feel the whole club go anxious and expectant around me. Aurora puts her head on my shoulder. "They love him already. Look at that." She pokes me in the ribs. "Love him just like you." I grimace but refuse to rise to her bait.

I thought I had been moved by Jack's music before; that was nothing compared to what happens now. The music washes through the packed room like a flood tide. It's the sound of spring rising out of a cracked and barren earth, gilding branches with new buds and loading vines with heavy blossoms, dusting bees with pollen. It's spring giving way to summer, balmy air smelling of roses, hot skin meeting the cold shock of the ocean, starry nights as warm as kisses. It's the soft touch of lips brus.h.i.+ng the hollow of your throat, slow hands on your naked skin. It's as elemental and necessary as the breath in my lungs, but far more beautiful than anything that is real. I open my eyes and look around me and see mouths open, cheeks wet with tears. But the hunger in their eyes terrifies me, their hands reaching for him as though they would tear him to pieces if he were among them. Devour him whole. No, I think, it's too much. It's too much. But I can't stop it, can't even stem my own desire, how much I want him, how much I want that music in me, too.

When he stops playing he stands for a moment, stilling the quivering strings with the flat of his hand, and then he walks off the stage. The room is as still as a cathedral for long seconds, and then everyone around me lets out their breath at the same time, and the madness leaves their eyes and they shake their heads as though to clear away a spell. Someone begins to clap, slow and uncertain, and then someone else joins in, and then the whole room roars, throats open wide, cheering and stomping their feet. I look over at Aurora. Minos is standing behind her, his arms around her waist, and she is leaning into him with her mouth open. He catches my look and smiles at me, a death's-head grin with no joy in it.

It is a long time before the cheering dies down, and a long time after that before the next band begins carrying their drum kit and amps onto the stage, shoulders hunched as though they are embarra.s.sed. The band launches into its first song and the chords jangle harsh and wrong. They falter and stop, start over again. I've seen them before and they were good, better than good, but there's no way anyone mortal can follow Jack. The singer, a girl with long dark hair and a baby face, seems near tears. Aurora is drinking one clear drink after another. "Let's go," I say to her, and she shakes her head.

"I'm having fun."

"This stopped being fun."

"You don't even try to have fun." She pouts at me. I know Aurora drunk by heart. I don't even need to see the flush in her cheeks or hear the challenge in her voice. Minos lurks behind her, bone-thin but somehow taking up too much s.p.a.ce. I don't like him, don't want to talk to him, don't want to watch Aurora flirt with him, giggling, like a rabbit teasing a wolf. He could eat her whole. He looks at me over her shoulder and smiles again. It's not friendly.

"I'm going to find Jack." I push past them before she can say anything else. I cut my way through the crowd to the door that leads backstage, wait until no one is looking and duck through it into the dingy and badly lit corridor.

Jack is in the green room, alone, sitting on a decrepit velour couch that looks like it's been abused by musicians for longer than I've been alive. His guitar is next to him and his head is in his hands. I feel suddenly foolish, duck my head in embarra.s.sment. But he looks up at me with such naked joy that I have to look away. I cross the room and before I even reach the couch he's on his feet, leaning toward me, his mouth meeting mine.

"They want so much," he says into my hair. "Every time I play for more people, they want more of me, and I feel so empty when I'm done. But it's the only thing I know how to do. It's the only thing I'm good at."

"You can learn other things."

"It's the only thing that makes me feel alive." He is holding my wrists now, so tightly it hurts. "Do you want to get out of here?"

"Let's go."

He lives in a one-story cottage caught between two larger buildings. A jungle of front garden hides it from the street: huge, glorious dahlias luminous in the moonlight; heady-scented wild roses; broad-leaved and tall green plants I do not recognize. Ca.s.s would know their names. The ground is carpeted with mint, and a riot of jasmine obscures the front porch. I stop to look at the flowers. "I've never seen dahlias this big."

"I play for them," he says. "I think they like it." He unlocks the door and I follow him inside.

The house is a single open room, with a small kitchen in one corner and big windows that look out on another, even junglier garden in back. There's a mattress under one of the windows with a book-stuffed shelf beside it, a cheap card table and two chairs, a soft rich rug, a dresser, a single lamp in one corner. A record player sits beside a wooden crate full of records. There's nothing on the walls except for a print of Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy tacked up over the bed. I've always loved that painting: the reclining figure stretched out on desert sand underneath a night-blued sky. Multicolored coat, striped blanket, lute. The moon is full, edging a range of mountains in silver. A lion stands over the sleeping figure, one yellow eye staring. Not at the sleeper, but at me. No one in the world knows where I am except Jack. I cross the room and squat next to the bookshelf. Mostly cla.s.sics: Ovid's Metamorphoses, The Odyssey, Keats, Shakespeare. A copy of The Inferno ill.u.s.trated by Gustave Dore. Art books: Lucian Freud, Kiki Smith. "Schiele," I say, "you like him?"

"I love him."

"So do I. You like Rousseau, too?"

He touches the picture. "Did you know he never left France in his entire life? He was a tax collector who painted taxidermied animals and invented a jungle out of the exhibits at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. He painted people like me without ever having met a black person." He stops and I wait for him to say something else. "It's a reminder," he says. "For me. Of what people see."

"Oh. I never thought about it that way before."

"Well," he says. "You're white."

"Oh," I say again.

He puts on a Nina Simone record, sits on the bed. "Come here," he says gently, and I move up from the floor so that I'm sitting next to him on the mattress. My heart is beating so hard I think he must be able to hear it. Nina Simone's low rich voice seals us in. "What do you paint?" he asks. "Surely not lions." He puts a hand on my back, his thumb gently rubbing the knot of bone where my neck meets my spine.

"People, mostly. Sometimes places. Sometimes things that aren't real."

"Would you paint me?"

"I can't."

"Try."

I hook my bag toward me with my foot, get out the jar of India ink and the soft brushes I carry with me everywhere. I get up, drag over one of his chairs, sit in it facing him, prop my sketchbook on my knees. I look at him for a long time, trying to see him as a series of lines, trying to see the shape underneath his skin, a language of his bones and his body that I can translate into marks on paper. The white page leers at me, mocking. I fidget, chew my brush. Then I have an idea.

"Take off your s.h.i.+rt," I say, "and lie down. He raises an eyebrow. "Not like that." I can feel heat rising to my cheeks, and I turn my head away. "Just do it." I hear the rustle of him moving around and don't look again until he is still. The lamplight gilds the smooth muscles of his back and arms, his long and beautifully shaped hands. He's turned his face away from me, and his hair coils across the pillow. I set down the sketchbook, put my brush between my teeth, and uncap the bottle of ink. "Keep still," I say into his ear, and then I go to work.

I draw a flight of sh.o.r.ebirds winging their way up his spine and a cl.u.s.ter of sea urchins spiking across his shoulder. I draw an osprey, stalled in midair with its wings crooked, in that still moment before it begins its dive. I draw waves rising between his ribs. I draw fish winking silver through the depths, kelp winding around them in thick glossy coils. I thought I knew my own desire, until the wind changed and a storm blew in and remade the sky, dredged mystery from the deep. I put a spell on you, Nina Simone croons. His back rises and falls as he breathes, and it is all I can do to keep myself from dipping my head and licking his skin. When the record ends I get up and turn it over. Nina Simone sings about sorrow and love, and the gold of her voice fills the air around us. When I am done I set the brush aside and put one hand over what I've drawn, fingers spread, not touching. Rousseau's lion watches over us, wide-eyed, solemn. Desire rises in me, humming like a song. The room is very still. I blow on his skin to dry the last of the ink and he s.h.i.+vers, catches my wrist. "Is it good?"

"It's beautiful," I say.

"Show me," he says.

"Do you have a mirror?"

"Not like that," he says. "With your hands."

You think that the world we live in is ordinary. We make noise and static to fill the empty s.p.a.ces where ghosts live. We let other people grow our food, bleach our clothes. We seal ourselves in, clean the dirt from our skins, eat of animals whose blood does not stain our hands. We long ago left the ways of our ancestors, oracles and blood sacrifice, traffic with the spirit world, listening for the voices out of stones and trees. But maybe sometimes you have felt the uncanny, alone at night in a dark wood, or waiting by the edge of the ocean for the tide to come in. We have paved over the ancient world, but that does not mean we have erased it.

Once upon a time, girls who were too beautiful or too skilled were changed into other things by angry G.o.ds and their wives. A cow, a flower, a spider, a fog. Maybe you boasted too loudly of sleeping with a G.o.ddess's husband. Maybe you talked too much about your own talents. Maybe you were born dumb and pretty, and the wrong people fell in love with you, chased you across fields and mountains and oceans until you cried mercy and a G.o.d took pity on you, switched your body to a heaving sea of clouds. Maybe you stayed in one place for too long, pining for someone who wasn't yours, and your toes grew roots into the earth and your skin toughened into bark. Maybe you told the world how beautiful your children were, and the G.o.ds cut them down in front of you to punish you for your loose tongue, and you were so overcome with grief your body turned to stone.

You know as well as I do that those things don't happen anymore. Girls stay girls, no matter how pretty they are. No matter who l.u.s.ts after them. But in this time, like in any time, love is a dangerous game.

Who among us has not wanted to be transformed? I had lived all my life surrounded by extraordinary people, and some nights I would fall asleep wis.h.i.+ng to wake up worthy of them. Not a painter, but an artist, someone who could capture life in a single perfect line, render the movement of light on water with the stroke of a brush. But the lesson in stories is always that metamorphosis comes with a price. Think of Midas, who asked for the power to turn the world around him into gold, only to sit alone in his palace full of riches, meat and wine turning to metal in his mouth. Think of Icarus, builder of wings, who flew too close to the sun and plummeted in one last fall. Think of Aurora's father, who woke up one morning with his songs playing on every radio in the world. He was never happy again after that, and now he's dead. The old G.o.ds do not give kindly; what delights them most is taking away.

Both of them, Jack and Aurora, burned like stars, and light like that draws things that are better left alone in the dark.

When I let myself into the apartment the next morning I know right away that I am in trouble. Aurora is sitting next to Ca.s.s on the couch, her knees drawn up to her chin. Ca.s.s is holding a mug of coffee. "Where the h.e.l.l were you," she says, her voice tight.

"I thought you were dead!" Aurora cries. She's still wearing her slip, her barrettes askew. There's a blanket around her shoulders. They must have spent the night on the couch.

"You could have at least called," Ca.s.s says.

"There wasn't a phone," I say.

"You were with him," Aurora says. "You left me at the club and didn't tell me where you went and I came here at three in the morning and told Ca.s.s I couldn't find you. We almost called the cops, and all you can say is that there wasn't a phone?" Ca.s.s puts her hand on Aurora's shoulder.

"Aurora, sweetheart, why don't you go sleep, and I'll deal with this." Without looking at me, Aurora runs into my room and slams the door behind her. "Come into the kitchen," Ca.s.s says. I follow her, sit in my favorite chair as she gets down her jars, measures out herbs, puts water on the stove to boil. The silence is like a third person in the room.

"Don't you ever do that to me again," she says at last. "I don't ask a lot of you, and I know you-" her voice breaks. "I know you grew up fast. But I'm still your mother, and you live in my house, and if anything happened to you I don't know how I would keep going. Do you understand?"

"Yes." She sets a mug in front of me. I drink my tea in chastened silence. Nettles and oat straw. She's stopped being mad. If she were still mad she'd have given me burdock or something worse.

"Do I need to give you the safe-s.e.x talk again?"

"Mom. He didn't give me a lobotomy."

She shakes her head. "Go to bed," she says, "before I kill you myself."

I think Aurora is fast asleep but when I slide under the covers she puts an arm around me. "I'm still mad at you," she murmurs.

"You were with that horrible man."

"He isn't horrible. He's nice."

"How old is that guy?"

She yawns. "Don't be bourgeois. And you're not off the hook." She closes her eyes and burrows closer to me. I hug her close and we fall into a dreamless sleep.

I wake up hours later. The long afternoon is slipping into twilight. I can hear Aurora in the kitchen, talking to Ca.s.s. I sit up, run my fingers through my choppy hair, look at my familiar walls covered in drawings and photo-booth strips of me and Aurora, me and Ca.s.s, an ancient one of Ca.s.s and Maia with their hair spiked and padlocked chains around their necks, flipping off the camera and kissing in the final frame.

When we first moved into the apartment, Ca.s.s let me paint one wall of my room a matte cream and draw on it. Over the years, Aurora and I mapped out our own kingdom, its outlines becoming more legible as my drawing skills improved. We'd started at the very center of the wall, a few feet off the floor. We'd been too small to reach any higher. We drew a village of lopsided houses with stick-figure people holding the leashes of stick-figure dogs. As the drawing spread outward, we added mountain ranges and forests, a sea dotted with tall s.h.i.+ps, a solitary dragon undulating overhead. We've never outgrown it. We'll get stoned on a sleepy, rainy afternoon and go to work. When Ca.s.s was teaching me to read tarot I drew the Queen of Wands with her cat, Strength and her lion, the Empress reclining on her throne. When Aurora first started sleeping with rockers, she added a slew of long-haired boys. Now, we draw people we know: Raoul and Oscar Wilde, Maia, Ca.s.s. We've never thought to add ourselves.

I root through my dresser for a clean pair of cutoffs and a T-s.h.i.+rt, carry them into the bathroom with me, and turn on the shower. Ink runs off my skin, pooling in the bottom of the shower, reminding me of the night before and turning my legs shaky with desire. I am not this kind of girl, I think, trying to be fierce with myself. I am not the kind of girl who ditches her best friend and runs out into the night with a stranger and kisses him until dawn. I am not some lovesick dupe. I am not at the mercy of my new, most favorite vice. I am not. I scrub until all traces of the ink are gone and the shower's out of hot water.